Read Online Action! by Carolyn Keene - Free Book Online

“I’m not a pro,” I told her. “I was terrified the whole time. The only reason I even got through it was because the Alvarez boys helped me.”
    Bess took a bite of her sandwich. “I doubt that,” she said. “Some of the lighting crew came over to help us with the new Mahoney house set. They said watching you was just like watching Esther Rackham herself!” She leaned in closer. “Even Luther thinks your character is totally authentic.”
    “Well, I was lucky in the scene we filmed this morning,” I said. “I could easily imagine what Esther was thinking. She didn’t want her brothers to commit a crime. She tried to talk them out of it.”
    Bess’s blue eyes narrowed. “Wait a minute,” she said. “I thought Esther didn’t know what her brothers planned to do. That’s what we learned in school, isn’t it?”
    I nodded. “Yeah. But Luther says that her diary hints at her knowing
something.
She tore out the pages about the actual heist and what happened to her brothers afterward.”
    “Right,” Bess said. “So why does Luther think she knew what they were planning beforehand?”
    “When he read over the diary again for this production,he found a passage that he hadn’t paid much attention to before,” I explained. “Two days before the heist, Esther wrote that she had a fight with her brothers. All she said was that she wanted them to ‘reconsider.’ They wouldn’t, and all three of them had a fight. Then the next day’s entry is torn out.”
    Bess nudged my arm. “Sounds mysterious,” she said with a grin.
    “I guess,” I said. “But I’m almost too busy trying to calm my nerves to get interested in a hundred-year-old mystery!”
    Bess just laughed. “Yeah, right! Well, I bet your nerves will calm down as soon as you step in front of the camera again,” she told me. “You’re a natural!”
    I sighed. My friends just didn’t seem to understand how much this stage fright was bothering me. But I really wanted to talk to them about it.
    In the afternoon I returned to the makeup trailer, where Pam and Degas made me into a younger version of Esther. Then we all went over to the Rackhams’ cabin set. I could see that Mary had done some work there to make the place look slightly different than it had before. The fabric on the couch was newer and cleaner, and there weren’t as many props cluttering the set.
    “I’m going to re-dress the set after every scene,”Mary explained to me. “We’re just going to craft little differences, so that audiences will think it’s a different day in each scene.”
    “And you’ll be sitting in different places in the cabin for each scene,” Morris chimed in. “One time you’ll sit at the table to write in the diary. Another time you’ll be on the couch, or in the rocking chair.”
    “It’s hard to believe that it will look as if each scene is a different time,” I said. “When I know all along that they were shot within an hour of one another.”
    “Okay, we’re ready,” Mary said. “The cabin set should look newer, as if Esther and her brothers hadn’t been living there for long. There isn’t as much furniture and there aren’t as many decorations on the walls.”
    I nodded. “It definitely looks newer.”
    “And
you
look younger,” Pam said with a proud smile. She powdered my face one last time, and then I took my place at the wooden table.
    My pulse pounded in my veins as I waited for the shoot to start. I felt out of place. What was I doing, acting in a movie? I wasn’t an actor—I was a detective! Solving mysteries, I could do. Helping people I could do too. But acting well? Or calming my own jitters? Not at all!
    Mary’s assistant handed me a leatherbound book.Inside were blank pages made of old-fashioned pressed paper. It was one of the three duplicates of Esther’s diary that the props department had made.
    “Here we go, Nancy,” Morris said. “You’re going to write in the front section of the book. Remember,